Hype machine

Just insisting that things are true, sans evidence, doesn't make them so. For example: DEI is lipstick on a pig.

hype /hīp/

noun

extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion.

"she relied on hype and headlines to stoke up interest in her music"

verb

promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits.

"an industry quick to hype its products"

The University of Colorado Buffaloes football team is currently 4–3 and in firm control of 9th place in the Pac-12 conference. But just a few weeks ago, after starting the 2023 season with a string of wins over TCU, Nebraska, and Colorado State, CU football and it’s head coach, Deion Sanders, were widely feted as saviors for the interminably boring, fading, out-of-touch sport known as college football.

To hear outlets such as Time and ESPN breathlessly hype the situation, Sanders was the undisputed new face of college football and a breath of fresh air in a sport full of staid coaching hoi polloi. College players from around the country were said to be suddenly researching how the transfer portal worked. The Buffs were about to smash the existing order and rule college football.

Well, that was then; this is now. And now that the erstwhile favorite for a hostile takeover of the existing order in college football is struggling just to remain relevant in the Pac-12, the hype machine has moved on. The new thing seems to be how much Taylor Swift has improved what was already the biggest TV draw in America, the NFL.

To be fair, I happen to like Deion Sanders. It took a while, because I spent a lot of time thinking that Sanders was mostly a self-hyping showman as both a football and a baseball player, until I saw him, in person, playing defensive back for the Cowboys in a game against the Denver Broncos in old Mile High Stadium. I’ve never seen anything like Sanders in an NFL defense, where he looked like a windshield wiper, covering the entire backfield with speed and athleticism I’d never seen in any other DB. I was a fan from then on.

But Coach Sanders is just like hundreds of other college football coaches in America, except for the name recognition: he’s just another guy trying to push enough of the right buttons to get somewhere north of 85 kids to win one for the Gipper, or for Prime, or anything else that might motivate them, so that he can continue his lucrative career as a coach.

Good on him, too. But I, for one, never believed the “Coach Prime” hype and am surprised that those who are paid to know better apparently did not. It’s a strange world. And if you want to keep your bearings, you’d best beware of hype machines.

Coach Prime may actually be used on both sides of an argument about hype. As a player, Sanders was everything that he was cracked up to be. But as the new face of college football, well, maybe not so much. At least the early returns aren’t particularly scintillating.

Hype is a bandwagon that almost everyone wants to ride. I don’t know what this says about human nature, but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it’s down a bit on the list of extremely useful human attributes. You might think that hype is just overblown silliness and much ado about nothing until you get in the way of a hype machine rolling under a full head of steam. In that event, a flattened Wile E. Coyote, R.U.

Last week, I wrote about the age of incompetence. This column hit a nerve. It turns out that disdain for incompetence is widely shared at this moment in time in this best of all possible worlds. To follow up, let’s examine the hype, which disguises, in my view, the greatest level of incompetence in government, academia, and some private businesses: the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) juggernaut and it’s attendant diminution of merit and expertise.

As with many bad social paradigms, there are kernels of truth in the hype promoting the DEI industry. Diversity is, at least in my view, almost always a good thing, as long as it’s diversity of thought and ideas instead of just the superficial diversity of people who don’t look alike.

Equity is similarly OK with me, as long as the goal is to level the playing field for everyone as opposed to ensuring outcomes for anyone. Who doesn’t want equal opportunity? It’s the destruction of work, diligence, and effort through the imposition of unmerited equal outcomes that bothers many, as it should.

Inclusion should also be universally desirable. Yet this innocent-sounding aspiration is being used to widely bash anyone as “uncollegial” (or worse) who’s not completely onboard with DEI. It’s the modern excuse for the goodbye look in woke America.

DEI is an unfunny joke that runs counter to almost everything that made this country great. The hype promoting DEI is a perfect definition of the term: promoting or publicizing a product or idea intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits.

Well, hype all you want. Tart up the destruction of meritocracy, the dismantling of freedom of speech and association, and the imposition of DEI loyalty oaths as a job hiring and retention requirement all you want; it’s all lipstick on a pig. And most people see through it these days.

I am from the camp that believes that “peak woke” has passed. Most people outside of government, academia, and some corporate boardrooms recognize the DEI industry and it’s supporting army of wokeness for what it actually is: a profitable entity designed to perpetuate its own existence through colossal levels of hype, coercion, and, failing that, intimidation. The good news is that there’s evidence that none of this is as effective as it used to be.

But I have no doubt that it’ll take decades to completely rid ourselves of this useless scourge, especially if conservatives in Washington continue to be such Romper Room screwups (Jim Jordan, R-OH, is the answer to no question concerning responsible conservative leadership or governing of which I’m currently aware).

At a time when the political right ought to be cleaning the left’s clock in this country, largely due to stupidity like DEI, the right has instead managed to repeatedly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by kowtowing to it’s most idiotic fringe. If Trump manages to win the Republican Party nomination for president in 2024, the backlash will all but ensure that we’re stuck with woke nonsense for longer than we need to be as the price for attempting to defeat Trump—something that the Republicans will have made possible almost entirely through their own ineptness.

Last year, I wrote about a prolonged legal battle involving Gibson’s Bakery vs. Oberlin College, eventually settled in favor of the Gibson family. This saga involved everything that I, and I daresay many of you, despise about “wokeness.” I must admit that I cheered when I read the final verdict in favor of Gibson’s Bakery, with damages awarded to them in the tens of millions.

There is a similar case going on here in Idaho, of all places, right now, involving a coffee shop owner in Boise who opened a location in the Student Union building at Boise State University and was forced to leave shortly thereafter (the university appears to have improperly voided her lease) over her modest support for Boise Police.

Outside of the BSU and Boise bubble (local joke: you ain’t from Idaho, you’re from Boise), everyone who knows about the circumstances surrounding this case shakes their head in dismay. It’s that bad. But in the end, I think this may be as big of a story as Gibson’s vs. Oberlin, as well as another dagger in the heart of wokeness.

More on this in the coming weeks.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com